My first experience with the common affliction of ‘former room nostalgia’ came in the fall of my freshman year, when I was awakened late at night by the sound of a girl I didn’t know knocking loudly and persistently on my door. When I kindly asked her what she thought she was doing in disturbing my sleep at three in the morning, a feverish light filled her eyes. “I used to live here,” she exclaimed excitedly. “Okay,” I replied, closing the door in her face and going back to sleep.

It was a strange experience that I didn’t quite understand at the time, but since then I have come to experience my own fair share of yearning for my first-year dorm room, which recently culminated in a visit to the place to relive old memories and see how it had changed in my absence. I wonder now whether I did that poor sophomore girl a favor by turning her away that night, because my visit turned out to be an uncomfortable, awkward, and truly depressing experience.

Thus, in an attempt to make others’ potential trips to their old living spaces just as fulfilling as mine was, I have compiled a handy guide of tips for when it’s late at night, you’re drinking in your room, and you want to go be drunk in the room where you used to do most of your drinking. Check it out after the jump. Continue Reading

I was a terribly anxious teenager, exacerbated by the fact that my parents let me watch Leeza Gibbon’s show What Should You Do? every Saturday morning. I recorded all aired episodes, playing one after the other as I came out of sleep. I awoke to the credits of What Should You Do? and was scared out of my slumber with shocking, real life events. A gun in your face — what should you do? You lose control of your car and plunge into a river, you get kidnapped and locked in a trunk, you are caught in an avalanche and buried alive, a burglar enters your house in the middle of the night — what should you do? Leeza Gibbons, with her perfectly coiffed blonde hair, prepared me for every harrowing moment imaginable…but never did she prepare me for what occurred last Saturday night. You make a frothy smoothie in the blender, it tips over, breaks into pieces, and it splatters everywhere. Your friend’s hand drips with blood. There is now a Jackson Pollock on your floor — what should you do? Lick it up. Naturally.

While the likelihood of a smoothie spilling in your room is…unlikely, the likelihood of your roommate sleepwalking and peeing on your chair, or your suitemate vomiting in the shower after a night of drinking is very possible. Yes, it happens.

Let’s take this time to prepare, because at any minute disaster could strike and you probably don’t want to have to use your bedside rug as a mop, or a paper bag as a dustpan. While alternative modes of cleanup work, it’s quite sad when you find yourself scooping up shards of glass with the cardboard tube of a paper towel roll. You’re correct in assuming that it doesn’t work so well.